How to Become a Freelance Digital Marketer in 2024

Your favorite shoes, TV shows, music, and websites all have one thing in common: they use digital marketers to help people like you find them and fall in love. That can make anyone want to become a digital marketing freelancer and help more companies and people find their perfect fit. It's a fun and dynamic job, and you get to experience new things regularly.

Suppose you're the type of person who likes creating things, experiencing a new adventure, or working on many projects at once. In that case, it might be time for you to consider becoming a freelance digital marketer. We put together this review to help explain the job, freelancing, and how to find great clients to help you get started.

In this review, you'll learn:

• What is a digital marketing freelancer?
• What kind of tasks and roles do they have?
• How do you get started in freelance digital marketing?
• What are the pros and cons of this work?
• What's a typical digital marketer salary?
• Seven steps to begin your career correctly
• How to communicate with clients and find success

Let's dive right in and explain digital marketers and the definition of freelance online marketing.

What is a digital marketing freelancer?

A digital marketing freelancer is any digital marketer who runs their own business to help clients. The category is broad, so it can cover all types of marketing that are common today. Digital marketers often wear many hats, and some of their most common activities include:

• Writing copy for blogs, web pages, and social media
• Building websites and helping with design
• Managing social media accounts and communities
• Creating advertisements, including copy and visuals
• Designing visuals such as infographics
• Creating and editing videos
• Holding webinars or running podcasts
• Running ad campaigns and managing ad budgets
• Developing a campaign and marketing strategy for your clients
• Emailing your client's customers and managing email marketing campaign
• Generating leads and qualifying them
• Onboarding new clients and managing client meetings

The day-to-day work of any given digital marketing freelancers can be completely different. Some freelance digital marketing professionals and digital media consultants focus on creating brand strategies. Others might work with in-house teams to create ads that are part of those campaigns.

Most digital marketers work with clients daily and communicate regularly. Some may specialize in niche areas—such as writing and market research—where interactions are only a few times a week.

What are the pros and cons of freelance digital marketing?

Freelance digital marketers and professionals have many choices and specific areas of expertise they can pursue within their line of work. This abundance of options means you can have a wide range of experiences if you decide to become a digital marketer. It's smart to consider the pros and cons of joining this field as an independent professional.

Here are the ones most freelance marketers we spoke to shared with us.

Pros

• The ability to work from anywhere and travel or change locations at any time. While COVID has made work-from-home temporary for some marketers, freelancers always have this option thanks to the nature of digital technologies.
• You can choose the work you want. Job services like Upwork provide you with access to many different digital marketing clients with their own needs. You pick the type of jobs, industries, and companies that you’d like to work with.
• Work the hours you want as long as you hit deadlines.
• Use the equipment and tools you have and prefer.
• You can rely on other freelancers as needed for help or expertise, enabling you to learn as you complete jobs.
• You can receive more immediate payments when you use services that provide escrow.
• You can work with clients anywhere. This gives you access to major markets and large corporations outside of the area where you live, potentially enabling you to charge higher rates for your work.

Cons

• You're also running your own business, so there are tax filings, licenses, and other things you might need.
• Invoicing, client management, social, and your own advertising still need to happen, but you can't bill these hours.
• You only get paid for what you do. Sick days or weeks with few projects will mean that your revenue fluctuates.
• Paid time off, insurance, and other benefits must be paid for entirely by you.
• Some find the ongoing hunt for clients stressful.

Being a freelancer can be a challenge. Thankfully, there are many opportunities to partner with others in your community. Local and online groups, forums tied to job boards, and national organizations can all help you find other freelancers who might be able to answer your questions, make business suggestions, or otherwise help you to tackle the challenges that you face.

How much do freelance digital marketers make?

Remember that large and diverse list of skills you saw earlier? This range of skills within the career means that freelance digital marketers can earn entirely differently. According to ZipRecruiter, these independent professionals in the U.S. have annual revenues of between $22,500 and $127,000. The national average is roughly $69,000 per year or about $33 per hour.

The more specialized you are, the more you can charge for your services. Focusing on high-impact areas, such as managing large campaigns for enterprises or learning AI tools to create marketing analytics, can also help.

On Upwork, you can quickly find freelance digital marketers at vastly different pricing. Entry-level marketers tend to charge around $20 to $30 hourly. People with more experience and expertise can make up to $80 per hour. Top professionals often charge as much as $125 or $150 per hour, with some even charging upwards of $300 per hour for specific projects such as creating ClickFunnels campaigns from scratch.

What are the different digital marketing jobs you can do?

While there are many skills and tasks required of digital marketers, a quick look at available jobs shows a concentration in a few areas. So, let's look at five of the hottest areas for today's freelancers.

Facebook and Instagram ads

Facebook owns Instagram, so advertising on both channels can be managed through a single account in Facebook's Ads Manager. Many small businesses advertise and find customers solely via social media, making expertise here a big draw. Small and mid-sized businesses often need freelancers more than a full-time employee, so mastering ad campaigns on these platforms can help you work with a diverse range of companies.

SEO consulting

Search engines drive significant traffic for businesses, and that means they also drive sales. SEO (search engine optimization) work takes place on a website and follows current best practices to help that site's pages perform better for user searches. Organic ranking, as opposed to paid ads, can help any business.

Chatbots and customer service

Chatbots are a growing customer service tool because they can now easily integrate with websites and even Facebook accounts. You may have chatted with someone through Facebook Messenger that was actually a chatbot. Business owners often need help with these tools, from installation and creating answers to optimizing them for sales. New professionals can find a lot of work with platforms such as ManyChat.

Sales funnels and landing pages

Digital marketers must master the art of the online sale. In most cases, that means reaching out to the customer repeatedly and creating website pages designed to give visitors what they need to make a purchase. The overall process of interacting with people and getting them to buy through ads, emails, and website content is called a sales funnel. Landing pages are specific pages people arrive at that are designed to close the deal. Marketers create both of these for businesses to help them thrive.

PPC and Google Ads

Pay-per-click advertising is a type of ad model where you place ads with sites, especially search engines, and pay the publisher when someone clicks on the ad. PPC campaigns can either cost a flat rate or require you to bid around keywords. The most prominent PPC network is Google Ads. It’s simple to run and works across nearly all ad campaign tools, making it one of the more common tools for marketers who create and run search ad campaigns.

A quick note is that Google's advertising program was initially named AdWords in 2000. Even though it shifted to the "Google Ads" branding 2018, many customers will still ask for AdWords help.

How to get started as a digital marketing freelancer

The demand for digital marketers is high and freelancing can be a smart entry point, but you need to do the challenging work of pitching your services to companies. On the bright side, you don't need to interact with HR and go through rounds of interviews, you just need to communicate with a team manager who is looking for specific help. There are some common steps you can take to start the process and make yourself a desirable option to companies.

Here are the seven things to know and do so you can get started as a freelance digital marketer.

1. Take a course to study what's new

There are many digital marketing courses available. Some come from small digital marketers and freelancers themselves while others are provided by universities and top marketing agencies.

Look for classes that can teach you about many different options and that show when they've last updated their materials. Information from just a few years ago may already be out of date and not relevant to you. If you take a course on a specific product, for instance, you need to be taught the latest version so you can understand how it works.

Certifications from well-known groups can go a long way in having a client trust that you can do the job they need.

2. Determine your skills

After you study and learn about the many different possible tasks within digital marketing, try them out. Your coursework may give you an overview of skills. If so, run through tests and programs to see where you excel. If not, create your own tests.Thankfully, there are many free tools for things like social media management, and most ad platforms will give you a small amount of free credit to try their system.

Through tests, trials, and asking colleagues and teachers to look at what you've created, see where you did well. Create a list of the skills that others praised. Now, create a separate list of the tasks and skills that you enjoyed. When a certain skill overlaps both categories, highlight it and add it to a new list of the services you can offer.

3. Pick your specializations

The new list will show you where you can succeed, because digital marketing requires both technical knowledge and a passion for the work. Focusing on areas you enjoy and have sufficient skill can turn freelancing into a long-term career that you enjoy. It keeps all of the "pros" we mentioned earlier available to you and minimizes the stress that the “cons” will place on you.

Specializing also minimizes your work. You'll find a few skills to practice and know to narrow your search for work around these items. When companies interview you, you'll know what to focus on and demonstrate. This focus prevents you from having to try and learn it all, or from looking for jobs that aren't a good fit.

4. Find expert help for ongoing support

Freelancers often can't get on-the-job training or ask a manager. However, you can find many mentors online. Groups on LinkedIn that focus on digital marketing, forums, Reddit, and local community businesses often are willing to help beginners learn the ropes and avoid mistakes. Start to create a community of people who do similar work to you so you have people to ask. It can make a world of difference when a client asks for something new or if a specific tool isn't working for a job.

Freelancers should also look for mentors who know about running a business. You'll likely face questions about how to approach clients, manage time, pay taxes, and more that are specific to where you live and work. A broad community can help you find the right answer or put you in touch with a professional who can address the issue and keep your business in good standing.

5. Follow blogs that focus on your specialty

Digital marketing practices change regularly. There's always a new platform update or social media channel ready to be tapped into. Search engines change how they rank websites, and certain ads become too familiar to be successful. The way you consume media is likely different now compared to five years ago, and so is all the marketing around that media.

The experts in the field address this by doing two things: They create blogs and they follow other professional blogs about their specialty. Blogs have become areas to showcase expertise and discuss the latest trends. Reading blogs regularly can help you stay on top of changes and discover new opportunities.

You'll also find research that impacts how you advertise. For instance, a few top blogs compiled data toward the end of 2020 that showed, despite the ongoing pandemic, people are searching for more specific businesses and products "near me" than ever before.  

6. Create your profile

Once your brain is full, it's time to start putting that knowledge to use. Create your freelance portfolio and profile to show who you are and what you offer. Tell a story around your skills and highlight work you've done. If you haven't landed that first job, use things created for school and online courses, or build something from scratch to demonstrate your capabilities.

Using services like Upwork can make this process easier because you've got a specific portfolio template to follow. You can also look at other marketers to see how they explain skills and offers. You'll see what works and what you don't like. Plus, you can browse jobs at the same time and ensure that your profile mentions the skills and software you see as being the most sought after by clients.‍

7. Start applying for entry-level jobs

After the skills are honed, you have ongoing lesson plans set up, and a profile ready, it's time to start applying for jobs. Use job boards, LinkedIn, and word of mouth to let people know you're offering digital marketing services. Seek out companies creating job posts and apply to them. Respond to requests with information, samples, and personal notes. Don't use a standard reply for everyone!

You’ll want to customize every pitch and response. It builds trust and helps people understand you better. It may take a few attempts, but you'll soon find the perfect place to start your new career.

How to find and communicate with your clients

Communication is your core skill when it comes to looking for clients and ensuring jobs are a success.

Digital marketing requires constant work with clients to understand their business and audience, especially when you're new. You'll want to learn about people, create personas, discover the best channels and times to do outreach, and learn who your clients see as their most profitable customers. This requires you to talk, ask questions, and listen.

One of the best places to do this is on the system that manages your tasks and contracts. While you can communicate via email and things like Slack, messages can often get buried and it becomes easy to miss deadlines, changes, or other contractual requirements. Start with a platform that keeps it all in one place, creating simple areas for finding clients, finalizing contracts, messaging, and updating milestones. Upwork and others put these all in one place, while still making them easy to search.

Make it easy on yourself by starting on these platforms. Heading over to a freelance job page and then using that same site for everything else will help you avoid confusion or missed communications as you begin your career. There are also built-in opportunities for feedback, making it one of the best tools for digital beginners.

Become a digital marketing freelancer today

It's time to get your career started. Take control of your future and sign up with Upwork to begin browsing digital marketing jobs and transition into the professional you want to be. Search for the perfect gig based on content area, company size, and the experience level they need.

You'll need drive and ambition to stay on top of things, but if you've made it this far then you likely have what it takes. Give yourself room to understand digital marketing trends and explore what's out there, then use proven job tools to land the best clients for you.